Political Psychology

New Explorations

Jon A. Krosnick, I-Chant A. Chiang, Tobias H. Stark, Jon A. Krosnick, I-Chant A. Chiang, Tobias H. Stark

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781315445663
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Psychology

In recent decades, research in political psychology has illuminated the psychological processes underlying important political action, both by ordinary citizens and by political leaders. As the world has become increasingly engaged in thinking about politics, this volume reflects exciting new work by political psychologists to understand the psychological processes underlying Americans' political thinking and action.

In 13 chapters, world-class scholars present new in-depth work exploring public opinion, social movements, attitudes toward affirmative action, the behavior of political leaders, the impact of the 9/11 attacks, and scientists' statements about global warming and gasoline prices. Also included are studies of attitude strength that compare the causes and consequences of various strength-related constructs.

This volume will appeal to a wide range of researchers and students in political psychology and political science, and may be used as a text in upper-level courses requiring a scholarly and contemporary review of major issues in the field.

1
THE TWO CORE GOALS OF POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY

Jon A. Krosnick, Tobias H. Stark, and I-Chant A. Chiang

Defining Political Psychology

As a very broad definition, it is safe to say that the field of political psychology is concerned with explaining political phenomena from a psychological perspective. This means that political psychologists study political decision-making, political action, and political attitudes through the perspective of unobservable psychological processes unfolding in the minds of political actors. In doing so, scholars typically explain a political phenomenon with established psychological concepts. For most political psychologists, contributing to understanding the political context is the primary goal of their endeavor. Less frequently has work from political psychology also contributed to psychological theory formation in general (Krosnick, 2002).

Political psychology’s focus on explaining political phenomena is partially due to the fact that political scientists have dominated the field for the last forty years. This is apparent in the ratio of political scientists compared to psychologists that have published in the seminal edited volumes in political psychology. For instance, ten of the 20 authors in Margaret Hermann’s (1986) book (Political Psychology: Contemporary Issues and Problems) were political scientists whereas only five were psychologists. Similarly, Shanto Iyengar and William McGuire’s (1993) book (Explorations in Political Psychology) has chapters from nine political scientists and only five psychologists and the Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology by David Sears, Leonie Huddy, and Robert Jervis (2003) has chapters from 18 political scientists and only seven psychologists. A similar trend can be observed among the participants of the Summer Institute in Political Psychology (SIPP) that was created at Ohio State University and is now at Stanford University. Since 1991, when SIPP was founded, there have regularly been twice as many applicants and participants from political science than from psychology (with the exception of a few years when the ratio was closer to 1.5). In 2006 and 2008, more psychologists than political scientists participated, but since 2009, political scientists have again outnumbered psychologists.

This dominance of political scientists might explain why political psychology—very much unlike other fields in psychology—seems to be predominantly not concerned with identifying pan-contextual principles of how the human mind works. Even though psychological theories are typically applied to understand political phenomena, this research rarely has attempted to advance our understanding of these psychological theories. Instead, much political psychological research is based on a genuine interest in understanding the political context.

For instance, many scholars in the field have applied psychological theories about human cognition and behavior to political decision-making or voting behavior. This approach has yielded useful insights for political science, but the explicitly stated benefit for psychology—and for understanding of the human mind in general—has been more limited. Research in political psychology may quite easily serve both purposes if researchers begin their projects by aiming to produce findings with implications of two sorts: (1) implications for understanding of politics and (2) implications for basic psychological theory. Research that focuses only on the first outcome may be better described as psychological political science but not as political psychology (Krosnick, 2002). In fact, the term “political psychology” implies that it is a form of psychology. As such, the field can contribute to the larger psychological endeavor of studying behavioral and mental processes to discover general laws if researchers choose to do so from the outset of their efforts and take the time to explain those implications in publications.

Conducting political psychology in the hope of advancing basic psychological theory is especially likely to help psychology, because more often than not, political psychologists step out of the laboratory and conduct their research in the real world. This is valuable partly because it maximizes the external validity of research findings. This benefit may not seem especially valuable to psychologists who place higher importance on internal validity than on external validity and who believe that internal validity can be maximized in context-free lab settings created by researchers. But a mix of lab and field studies can maximize both internal and external validity, and studies of the real world often enrich basic psychological work by pointing to processes, mediators, and moderators that would not necessarily find their way into theorizing about impoverished, constructed context-free lab settings. Experimental research might be best viewed as suggestive about how people make decisions and behave in similar situations in the real world. To quote Roderick Kramer (Chapter 4, this volume), “the failure of most experimenters to ever step outside the cloistered confines of the psychological laboratory and into the booming, buzzing and messy world of the field has limited our knowledge about these important processes.” Political psychology can fill this gap in psychology with its focus on real world behavior of humans in the political context.

In this light, it is interesting to note that this book spotlights political psychology done by psychologists or in the spirit of psychology. Thus, this book illustrates how the application of psychological theories to the political context can advance both our understanding of politics and our understanding of the underlying psychological processes. For instance, Laurel Harbridge and colleagues (Chapter 9, this volume) find that the application of theories of media priming enhances our understanding of people’s approval of the U.S. president and yield new insights into the limits of media priming in general. Likewise, Joanne Miller and colleagues’ (Chapter 6, this volume) study of political issue salience furthers our understanding of which political issues are relevant for whom and enhances more generally the psychological study of attitude strength. Penny Visser and colleagues (Chapter 8, this volume) improve our understanding of attitude-(in)congruent political behavior and, at the same time, of the multidimensionality of the psychological concept of attitude strength.

The book is organized in three part. The first part shows four examples of analyses beginning with psychological theories and yielding new perspectives on various political processes. The second part addresses the question of what determines political cognition and behavior, with a special focus on the importance of policy issues to individuals. The third part consists of three examples of how application of psychological theories can challenge conventional wisdom in the political domain. Despite addressing a large variety of political phenomena, every article in this volume ends with a clearly visible contribution to psychology in general.

Content of This Book

Part I: New Theoretical Perspectives on Political Science Questions

In Chapter 2, Jonathan Bendor discusses limitations of classical Rational Choice Theory in political science and presents ways in which ideas from the psychological study of bounded rationality may overcome or ameliorate these limitations. Virtually all rational choice models build on the premise that people compare different strategies to each other. But this procedure is cognitively demanding when choice problems are complex; hence it may not be used often in such situations. Instead, people may adopt a strategy if its expected outcome is better than their aspiration level (reference point). Such heuristics are also much more broadly applicable than rational choice procedures when people have only partially ordered preferences. The author further argues that models that build on aspiration levels instead of a conscious rational comparison of choice options offer new theoretical explanations of problems and puzzles that political science has faced.

With several examples, Bendor demonstrates how aspiration-based models offer new solutions to unresolved problems in political science (e.g., the paradox of voting). Along the way, the author shows how mathematical formalizations can help identify gaps in researchers’ thinking, both in political science and psychology.

Importantly, Bendor concludes that both rational choice and aspiration-based models have their merits; neither should be used exclusively. The difficulty of the problem people are facing often determines whether they can decide rationally or not (i.e., whether the complexity of the task exceeds their cognitive constraints). It is the task of the political psychologist to identify whether ideas from rational choice theory or the bounded rationality research program are most applicable in the given situation. Bendor’s chapter provides a great resource for making this decision.

In Chapter 3, Gregory Mitchell and Philip Tetlock present a so-far underutilized methodology that might advance theory formation in both political philosophy and social psychology. The so-called “hypothetical society paradigm” promises a solution to a problem both fields are regularly facing: that participants of real-world debates often invent facts to justify their opinions and conceal double standards. This prevents the possibility to disentangle value orientations from factual beliefs in people’s ultimate assessment of a situation.

The hypothetical society paradigm combines the advantages of thought experiments with laboratory experiments to overcome this limitation. Participants are asked to react to concrete scenarios that describe hypothetical societies. Because all relevant facts are laid out in the description, participants cannot invent new facts to justify the scenario. Instead, they have to base their reaction purely on their value orientation, given the facts. By comparing, for example, different distributions of wealth and the relation between effort and pay-off, people’s generic understanding of justice can be gauged. With this method, Mitchell and Tetlock show that people’s attitude toward corrective justice is much less dependent on political ideology than previously assumed.

The authors also discuss how this method can be used to tease apart the underlying reasons for behaviors that are predicted by multiple social psychological theories. Psychologists sometimes face the problem that they have to deduce participants’ psychological reasoning post hoc from their behavior. The authors discuss how the hypothetical society paradigm can be utilized to get a better understanding of the underlying psychological processes in order to advance psychological theories.

In Chapter 4, Roderick Kramer presents a psychological perspective on the decision-making of political and business leaders. In particular, he focuses on situations in which leaders, either through their own mistakes or through external events, are confronted with threats to the way these leaders see themselves and want to be seen by others (their identity). Kramer’s psychological approach offers a new way to understand leaders’ decision-making in such situations. He suggests that threats to leaders’ identity create a state of identity dissonance, which these leaders are motivated to reduce through strategies of attention diversion.

In three qualitative case studies, Kramer presents evidence in line with his concept of identity-based (re-)categorization that explains decisions and behavior of leaders facing assaults on their authority or legitimacy. In such identity-threatening situations, leaders tend to employ cognitive strategies to divert the attention to alternative identities of the leadership or the organization. One strategy is to highlight positive dimensions of one’s identity through generating social comparison groups that make the organization or the leader look more favorable on seemingly more relevant dimensions. Another strategy is to cognitively focus on more flattering dimensions of one’s identity while downplaying those dimensions that have been threatened.

This psychological perspective on political decision-making offers a promising new perspective for political scientists trying to understand why leaders sometimes make the decision they do. Kramer illustrates in his analysis of Lyndon Johnson’s unexpected reactions to developments in the Vietnam War how an identity-threat perspective can lead to a new understanding of political leaders’ behavior. In fact, the author concludes that few activities of leaders are as consequential to the vitality of an organization or the legitimacy of his leadership as the re-categorization of the identity in focus.

In Chapter 5, Doug McAdam challenges three widely cited “facts” about the origins, the development, and consequences of social movements. In his overview of the history of research on social movements, the author points out that the field originally was very psychological and ignored the more structured organizational and political dimensions of social movements. The subsequent sociological and political science research, in contrast, focused almost exclusively on the social structure and overlooked important psychological processes. For instance, McAdam makes the compelling point that participation in a movement is contingent on existing social ties (structure) but only if such ties and participation in the movement reinforce an identity (psychological) that is important to the individual. This argument is in line with the findings of Visser and colleagues (Chapter 8, this volume) who show that attitude-congruent behavior, such as joining a social movement, depends on the personal importance people attribute to the goal of that movement.

McAdam points out several shortcomings in the social movements literature. Most provocative is his observation that several widely believed “facts” about movements are based on research that betrays the cardinal methodological sin of “selecting on the dependent variable.” This approach has probably exaggerated the link between certain factors and participation in, or the consequences of, social movements. This does not necessarily mean that the widely believed facts are wrong, but that better research designs are needed to test these “facts” and to achieve a fuller understanding of the processes that might have led to the observed regularities. As such, this chapter is also meant as a call for more psychological research in social movements studies. McAdam suggests several promising paths that future research could follow.

Part II: Determinants of Political Cognition and Political Behavior – the Role of Personal Importance

In Chapter 6 at the beginning of Part II, Joanne Miller and colleagues build on psychological theories to improve our understanding of a widely used concept in political science: issue salience. Decades of research has shown that some people think more about certain issues than others and that people’s attitudes toward these issues can affect their behavior. However, the literature has been divided about the question which issues are most influential. Are these the issues of national importance or those that are of personal importance to people?

Based on nine studies, Miller and colleagues argue that personal importance is the ultimate root of issue salience and present evidence of its psychological consequences. Surveys and a laboratory experiment show that voting, writing letters, and making phone calls to express policy preferences, contributing money to lobbying organizations, and attending group meetings are all inspired by personal importance but rarely by national importance. A deeper look at psychological consequences allows the authors to provide an explanation for this finding: Personal importance is behaviorally consequential because it instigates vigorous cognitive and emotional issue engagement.

Contrary to some earlier assertions, this chapter suggests that issue salience is relatively stable. Whereas political events or media attention may easily and quickly increase or decrease people’s perception of the national importance of certain issues, this is not true for personal importance. People think deeply about issues they find personally important, store information in long-term memory, and experience strong emotions. An increase in media coverage might affect the appearance of the national importance of certain issues, but these fluctuations will not be especially consequential for people’s own preferences.

In Chapter 7, Joanne Miller and colleagues extend Douglas McAdam’s (Chapter 5, this volume) theoretical criticism of widely believed “facts” about social movements. The authors challenge the notion that political activism is predominantly motivated by people’s dissatisfaction with the current life circumstances. Building on psychological insights from Prospect Theory (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979), the authors argue that much more motivating than dissatisfaction with the status quo is the threat of an undesirable policy change. The fear that things may get worse in the future should be a stronger motivator for social action than the possibility that things may get better in the future.

Evidence from three empirical studies, two of which include experiment...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• 1 The Two Core Goals of Political Psychology
• Part I New theoretical Perspectives on Political Science Questions
• Part II Determinants of Political Cognition and Behavior—the role of Importance
• Part III Challenging Conventional Wisdom about Politics
• Index